Image – UW Computational Finance & Risk Management

While 2020 has been a challenging year for many of us, we were very excited to start the new academic year. In this year’s online orientation, the CFRM faculty and staff welcomed 38 new students for our on-campus MS-CFRM program and 12 new students for our online program, joining us from across the country and around the world.

CFRM Program Director Tim Leung with UW mascot Dubs II.

The new undergraduate major in computational finance and risk management (CFRM) has just completed a very successful admission cycle. This competitive major will provide undergraduate students with rigorous training on modern quantitative science with programming and finance.

To facilitate research collaboration and strategic partnership between CFRM and industry, we are excited to launch the CFRM Quantitative Analytics Lab (QAL). Projects at QAL will involve the interplay of big data, quantitative methods, machine learning models, and algorithms to solve the most practical problems in the finance industry and beyond. We’ll continuously engage with industry professionals to create new research projects and other collaborative opportunities. If you have any project ideas, please share with us!

Over the years, the CFRM program and AMATH department have made a series of outreach activities to promote diversity and inclusion. Within the past 12 months, we have played an active role as a partner of Math Alliance to provide mentorship to minority and underrepresented students across the US. We have also attended national STEM diversity conferences and visited several HBCUs, including Spelman College, Morehouse College, and Clark-Atlanta University. We also continue our tradition of celebrating the success stories of our alumni in our Alumni Spotlight series.

It’s more important than ever for us to stay together and be supportive. The program can serve as the key connector and facilitator for the CFRM community. Together with our students and alumni, we have much to look forward to in the year ahead.

This year marks a number of exciting developments and milestones for the CFRM program. In September, we welcomed our largest ever cohort of 42 students for our on-campus MS-CFRM program. We also launched our new online graduate certificate in Financial Data Analytics (FDA). Our first FDA certificate cohort includes students working full-time at companies such as The Boeing Company and The World Bank. In expanding our certificate offerings, we expect our courses to reach more and more working professionals worldwide who are interested in quantitative finance.

Back home in Seattle, CFRM continues to collaborate with the local finance industry and professional societies such as the CFA Society, CAIA, and SAIA. As featured in the UW Daily, we have been gearing up our efforts to connect with the Seattle fintech industry and to educate our students, by adding a course about fintech, blockchain, and cryptocurrency. We are also expanding our footprint to neighboring regions and across the country, such as attending the CFA Society of Vancouver Annual Economic Forecast Dinner, as well as a number of local and national conferences.

Looking forward, our CFRM graduate program will soon be augmented by a new undergraduate major in Computational Finance and Risk Management, in addition to the existing CFRM minor, starting next academic year. Together, these programs will provide more opportunities for the growing number of students interested in computational finance and risk management.